Sweet result for students' honey video

INTERESTING SCIENCE: "You learn to look at things in a different way," says Ben Davis, left.

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It turns out honey is far more than just a humble breakfast spread. Five Freyberg High School pupils have been buzzing since they won the Comvita Science Video Challenge earlier this month.

The competition asked teams of secondary school students to make an educational video about the health benefits of a chosen ingredient.

With group member Johanna Lloyd's mum a beekeeper, the choice of topic was obvious.

Johanna says the first step was research, where the group learnt a lot about honey - particularly its medicinal properties.

Honey was used during the Greek Empire to treat cuts and burns, Johanna says, and it still has modern uses.

"It's outperforming antibiotics in hospitals and stuff; when people have wounds, just slap honey on it."

Johanna wrote the script for the video, with Ben Davis and Charlotte Stewart-Hall doing the voice-over and Ella White and Emily Shaw the animation.

Johanna and Emily say there was planning involved in what would go into the video but they did not go so far as to design storyboards.

The video opens with a stop-motion scene of Winnie the Pooh talking to the other residents of the 100 Acre Wood atop a beehive, before going into a series of animations.

"We went out and took photos of my mum's beehives with all of my brother's Pooh Bear toys," Johanna says.

Emily says the animations were done on an iPad, with her and Ella thinking up drawings to go with each part of the script.

"We had a little bit of class time but we did most of it out of class," Ella says.

Charlotte says the biggest challenge of recording the voices were time constraints and synching the vocal track with the images.

There were also a couple of moments the team would have liked to have re-recorded because of difficulty pronouncing words in the script, she says. All five say science is their favourite subject. "It's interesting; you get to understand how things work. You learn to look at things in a different way," Ben says. Johanna says it helps that "we have an awesome science teacher" who makes science fun. That "awesome" teacher, Alice Barnard, says the team's range of skills was a key to its success. "They're a good combination, they worked well as a team."

Their video at vimeo.com/48416384 was scientifically accurate and relevant to the topic but easy for people to understand.

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